When it comes to your health and wanting to feel the way you want, body acceptance is important I am all for that. It's important to want to feel comfortable in your skin and have confidence. That’s awesome and should be propelled for people to understand and feel. But not when it comes to the cost of your health. And some people have used this movement to perpetuate laziness and excuse-driven choices to let their health subside and fall to a level that could be dangerous and possibly cause death.
There has been and continues to be a push for accepting being overweight as a form of body positivity and how either ignoring or sometimes even blatantly going against the health risks and concerns for being either mediocrely or drastically overweight is wrong. Being overweight is always a health risk. And the higher you move up in being overweight, the more your risk increases. We know this through numerous amounts of studies that have been done over several years. But even aside from that, the more someone begins to put on weight and also accompanied by lack of nutritious eating and movement causes more stress and inflammation for the body which brings on a host of medical issues.
Recently, an online personality and fat acceptance and body positivity advocate named Jamie Lopez died at the age of 37. she was known as the “super-sized salon” star for operating a beauty plus-sized salon for plus-sized women. Lopez at her heaviest was 846 pounds where she was bedridden and couldn’t move. She stated she had to learn to walk again as the weight came off because of how heavy she was and the damage she had done to her body. She realized at some point that she needed to lose weight and got down to 400lbs and although this was a good move in a positive direction sadly it wasn’t enough. She ended up passing due to heart problems. Being this size is only a matter of time before your heart will give out. And although she got down to 400lbs, she was still drastically overweight and any level of obesity will cause health problems with health getting worse the higher you are in body fat percentage.
If Lopez had just taken more appropriate measures for her health she could have still been here, moving forward with her life and doing so much more. That might seem a little harsh but it’s the honest truth. No one should get anywhere near that size. Your life should be filled with you trying to reach your potential and an individual being that size will be hindered at almost every point. You won’t be able to move or get anything done and will cut your life short because of the constant unhealthy choices that were being made over the years.
And in my opinion, the people who advocated for this plus-sized lifestyle and were for it should feel ashamed of themselves as well. Because now you have a woman that lost her life because of the sole fact she and other people with the same mentality wanted to disregard the fact that being that obese and pushing this body positivity movement forward even if it runs the risk of the individual getting in a zone that could possibly cause them harm or even cause death is not ok. To me, that’s just absolute nonsense and insane. And what was it for? All because the person would not like the fact of hearing that what they were doing to themselves was very detrimental to their health and that they needed to lose weight? Nonsense.
But on the other side of the spectrum, no one is saying you need to be a ripped and fitness superstar either. There are always some people who push back on this because they get the idea that just because I look the way I do and train the way I train that I am advocating for everyone to be a fitness freak. This is not the case at all. I want everyone to feel comfortable, strong, and empowered in their own bodies but ABOVE that, to be in a healthy state of body and mind accompanied with energy. I have had and have clients who want to make progress in their health but don’t want to be at a high level of fitness. They still want to enjoy the choices of certain foods and just want to engage in the amount of fitness and nutrition that will allow them to be in a healthier state than where they are and also grow as individuals.
And that will differ for each individual. But when you get to a point where you allow yourself to become drastically overweight or at a point where you don’t eat nutritionally at all, don’t exercise or do any form of fitness or physical activity by any means ever, find it hard to move around and even do basic tasks at home or at work, feel as though you don’t ever have any energy, get quickly winded from moving or doing minor movements and take a longer period to recover and always indulge yourself in factors that could potentially cause a health risk OVER choosing foods and movement that will be beneficial for you, then I think there is cause for concern and its time to do an overhaul of your choices towards your health.
Because what people always overlook from my experience is people drastically overestimate the small incremental choices, they make day to day that over time snowball into causing them to be where they are today. It is the little choices you make in an structured fashion that get you to the point of where you are, whether that be a good place or a bad place. And doing so while not being aware will cause you to be in a place that you might not like OR you might not actually care to do anything about but will realize in the future it could potentially affect the ability for you to live your life and also shorten it by several years.
So, you need to ask yourself, are you in a place right now of health risks in your life? And if you are, what are you going to do about it? Because to me, body positivity is about not just feeling good but more importantly, how you treat your body. And if that involves doing anything from starting to eat better to exercise to just getting up and moving around then it should be done. Because that’s also treating yourself with respect and giving your body and mind the things it requires EVEN IF you don’t feel like it. Sometimes we need to do things we don’t feel in order to achieve the results we desire but are too scared or lazy to pursue. But again, it all falls down to you as no one can make you do it but yourself.